TORUS is pleased to announce RIFF, a solo exhibition of new video work by Austin Texas-based artist Mimi Bowman, featuring music by Chicago ambient trio Purelink. In a process akin to sampling, Bowman weaves hypnotically rhythmic visual tapestries from video snippets culled from across the internet. To source her material, the artist painstakingly combs through repositories of vernacular video, such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, like a miner or archaeologist sifting through mountains of common dirt to uncover precious gems and mysterious artifacts. Bowman’s selections juxtapose the miraculous and the mundane, scenes from a vast spectrum of human experience captured as cell phone snapshots of the sublime. The resulting montage experience is akin to scrolling a hyper-feed of the collective unconscious. Beguiling images of natural and manmade phenomena are sequenced in rapid succession, generating kinetic and optical resonances across vastly disparate subjects, hinting at some ineffable pattern underlying reality.

Bowman’s work investigates the question of response and responsibility regarding our relationship with the algorithm. In the process of mining for source material, the artist inevitably encounters filter bubbles. As soon as Bowman lingers on a certain video, the algorithm shifts her feed towards related material, entering into a kind of dance in which the artist and algorithm alternate as lead partner. While each of us shape our algorithm, exactly where our influence begins and ends remains hidden. In Bowman’s view, this invisible line between scroller and algorithm has created an ouroboros-like relationship with this proprietary social engineering technology; a living maze with no exit. Accordingly, an unsettling aspect is evident in Bowman’s videos, a palpable sense of dread colliding with euphoric wonder.